Oracle Unveils First Phase of Identity Management Suite

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/13/09

Oracle has begun releasing pieces of its identity management suite, Oracle Identity Management 11g. The first set of enhancements has surfaced in releases of Oracle Platform Security Services, Oracle Directory Services, and Oracle Identity Federation 11g, among other applications.

The new suite is intended to deliver single sign-on and access management for the company's many Fusion Middleware products. It includes new common components, such as shared infrastructure services for encryption, credential management, security policy and meta-data management, auditing, and systems management.

"Enterprise security is an absolute necessity and businesses cannot afford to compromise," said Amit Jasuja, vice president, Oracle Identity Management. "Oracle developed Oracle Identity Management 11g with our customers in mind, delivering the most integrated, comprehensive, and hot-pluggable security solution on the market. With the Service-Oriented Security approach, businesses can seamlessly build and integrate security into their key technologies to help lower the costs and resources required to implement world-class security."

Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS), a new layer for security services available through Oracle Fusion Middleware, allows developers to build security into their applications and deploy them into a centralized identity management framework.

Oracle Directory Services features a newly integrated administration console--Oracle Directory Services Manager--to allow administrators to manage and configure LDAP directories, virtual directories, and meta-directories from a central interface. The directory services software also includes new wizards to help accelerate directory deployments by simplifying tasks such as sizing, tuning, and replication.

Oracle Identity Federation now features the Universal Federation Framework, extending connectivity to a broad set of protocols, including SAML 2.0, Microsoft CardSpace, Liberty, WS-Federation, and others. OIF has also passed Liberty Alliance SAML 2.0 interoperability testing. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) provides an XML-based framework for creating and exchanging security information between online partners.

Oracle Web Services Manager and Oracle Access Manager have significant enhancements to provide integrated access control, including message encryption, identity propagation, and policy management for Web-based applications and Web services in a heterogeneous, multi-vendor environment.

Third-party companies will be able to use the new set of products to build security into their own applications and automate the integration and deployment of these applications into security infrastructures.

"The release of Oracle Identity Management 11g marks a significant advance in the integration and manageability of identity management software. The declarative security framework in Oracle Identity Management 11g will allow a dramatically simplified process of incorporating security into applications, and the suite-wide integration combined with a rich Web 2.0 administrative interface will help reduce the resources required to deploy and manage security within the enterprise," said Kris Virtue, staff IT manager for identity solutions and security operations at Qualcomm.

Oracle also announced Oracle Identity Analytics, an integrated audit and compliance solution. The product provides analytics and reporting for identity data pulled from multiple enterprise systems, applications, and network monitoring solutions into an "identity warehouse."